ADB ships 50-millionth device

Advanced Digital Broadcast (ADB) has shipped its 50 millionth device — an ADB Wideband gateway which is being delivered to Canal Digital Kabel-tv in Norway.

The device features the ADB Carbo user interface and will run ADB Multi-Room software, giving users live TV, DVR and video-on-demand (VOD) experience across set-top boxes and other secure devices throughout the home, regardless of the physical location of the recording or the tuner being accessed.

The milestone is the culmination of thousands of man-years of research and development at ADB's facilities in Poland, Italy, Ukraine and Taiwan since the company's launch in 1995, the company said. "With each broadband gateway featuring 30 million lines of code and the new Wideband set-top box 100 million lines, ADB's software engineers' code would now stretch to the edge of our solar system," it noted.

"We have reached an important milestone in the transition of the company from a traditional hardware focus to one where software and services are key," said Peter Balchin, CEO at ADB. "This is the cornerstone of our connected homes, connected lives vision where multimedia content and services come from multiple sources and need to seamlessly move between multiple screens and devices, wherever the user happens to be."

The company noted that every year, 55 million TV viewers consume 80 billion hours of TV using ADB technology and 62 million individuals spend 45 billion hours online using ADB's broadband technology. In total, operators across the world ruse ADB technology to manage 115 exabytes of data traffic each year. To put that in perspective, one exabyte is 1,018 bytes and holds 100,000 times all the printed material in the Library of Congress.

"Playing to the cliché that software developers work long hours on a diet of pizza and coffee, we worked out that our software development team has consumed over two million pizzas, 1.7 tonnes of coffee, 100,000kg of pasta and over 2.6 million pirogi dumplings over the years," said Paul Bristow, vice president of marketing communications at ADB. "But the result is staggering – our modern wideband gateway has as many lines of code as two large hadron colliders, while a typical broadband gateway has more lines of code than an F-36 stealth fighter."